Toe Shoes That Carry a Princess to Victory

‘Twyla Tharp’s The Princess and the Goblin’

Alessa Rogers, above center, as Princess Irene in “Twyla Tharp's The Princess and the Goblin,” a retelling of a 19th-century fable.Credit
Kim Kenney/Courtesy of Atlanta Ballet

ATLANTA — “The Princess and the Goblin,” a fantastical story that George MacDonald published in 1872, is the kind of children’s literature that adults can read with pleasure. Enchanting and funny, it’s laced with sharp wisdom, moral without being moralistic. The 8-year-old heroine is brave and good and yet not dull.

Twyla Tharp’s new ballet shares some of that story and some of those virtues. It’s partly a marketing ploy that the ballet’s full title — “Twyla Tharp’s The Princess and the Goblin”— includes the name of this eminent choreographer, whom the Atlanta Ballet and Royal Winnipeg Ballet jointly commissioned. But the title is also accurate. This imperfect work, which had its world premiere by the Atlanta company at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center here on Friday, is very much Ms. Tharp’s version.

She has retained the royal heroine, Irene, as well as the goblin foes and their sensitive feet. This Irene still gets help from a commoner boy, Curdie, and supernatural assistance from her great-great-grandmother. But, unlike MacDonald’s Irene, here she also has two younger sisters, who are abducted by the goblins, along with other children. Since Irene’s father, King Papa, is too self-absorbed to notice, it is up to Irene and Curdie to rescue them.

In MacDonald’s story the great-great grandmother spins an invisible thread; in Ms. Tharp’s, she simply spins. Which is to say that Ms. Tharp, more than just altering the plot, has translated the story into ballet terms. As Richard Burke’s score skillfully stitches together Schubert compositions and his own modern music, Ms. Tharp defies, teases and embraces 19th-century ballet conventions.

The great-great-grandmother spins en pointe. The magic she passes down is concentrated in toe shoes, which she teaches Irene how to use in a scene backed by a corps of women in white, a traditional ballet blanc. Earlier she teaches her great-great-granddaughter an ancestral talisman of a step, based around the pointing of feet.

Photo

Christine Winkler as Princess Irene's great-great-grandmother in “Twyla Tharp's The Princess and the Goblin.”Credit
Kim Kenney/Courtesy of Atlanta Ballet

But the shoes are crucial. For Irene they’re not only a means of spiritual lightness and elevation; they’re also weapons. Quite unlike the damsels in distress of most 19th-century ballets, Ms. Tharp’s young heroine requires no help in a fight. She and her little sister kick the goblins and stomp on their tender feet. Yet Ms. Tharp’s Irene is a young woman (played by the 24-year-old Alessa Rogers) rather than a child, so that she may apply the full range of classical technique.

The male goblins are both intimidated and seduced by Irene. The female goblins are envious: they flock around her, fascinated by her footwear, as if to say, “Where did you get those?” They have to try out toe shoes for themselves, and so we get some nice inside jokes about point work and partnering.

This ballet is packed with jokes. The goblins are more comic than menacing. (Anne Armit’s costumes keep them human-looking, hooligans in ragamuffiny hoodies.) As in MacDonald’s story they are vain. (Though deformed morally and physically by living underground, his goblins consider themselves more refined than the humans above.) But Ms. Tharp’s goblins are vain in the way of dancers.

The King of the Goblin (John Welker), a real scoundrel, is always taking self-satisfied solos. So is the Queen (Tara Lee), whom Ms. Tharp gives a slinky, icy, character-defining entrance. When this royal couple discover their subjects dancing, they must finish the divertissement themselves. And so we get a grand pas de deux, with some of Ms. Tharp’s quickest and fanciest choreography, and Irene and the children get a chance to escape.

By this time the Queen’s goofy, maltreated guards have switched sides. The other side of dancerly vanity is getting carried away in dance. Even Irene and Curdie temporarily forget their mission. But Irene has the example of her great-great-grandmother, who arrives to lead the way out.

At first Curdie does not see the older woman, does not believe in her. Then, in a sudden change of heart typical of the swift narrative, he does. This switch makes possible a romantic pas de deux between him and Irene. It is clearly a coming-of-age moment for Irene, but it’s also an example of love, which we witness the goblins following.

Video

'The Princess and the Goblin'

Twyla Tharp's "Princess and the Goblin" has its premiere at the Atlanta Ballet.

Irene teaches them, and she teaches the children, who all perform the ancestral step. Then she and her sisters return home to teach their father (also Mr. Welker, in a psychological bit of double casting). King Papa, softening, gives his blessing to Curdie, and the two men pass Irene between them in a long gorgeous skein of pas de trois, until King Papa takes his leave and Curdie carries Irene off in a soaring lift.

By advancing Irene’s age, Ms. Tharp puts the story in familiar Tharpian territory. But her choreography for the children, students from the Atlanta Ballet school, is smart, striking a difficult balance between wildness and order. And when Irene teaches a girl (Sophie Basarrate) just old enough for point shoes and pairs her with an adolescent boy (the noble Kevin Silverstein), the generational continuity of ballet — the invisible thread — is represented movingly.

More moving still is the ballet’s final moment. At the end of the order-restoring finale the spinning by Irene and her great-great-grandmother is taken up by the parents, now reunited with their children and carrying them, much as the goblins had earlier. It’s a powerful image of love.

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I saw the ballet twice and was moved by it much more the second time. On my first go I was too preoccupied with the ballet’s divergences from MacDonald’s book. I couldn’t help missing MacDonald’s Irene, much more complexly appealing than the sweet cipher of Ms. Tharp’s empowerment fable. And I resented the diminishment of MacDonald’s great-great-grandmother, tart and sage, into a generic Fairy Godmother.

The performances are somewhat at fault. Ms. Rogers, though she has a pretty line, underplays the flares of sass that Ms. Tharp gives Irene, and the veteran Christine Winkler is blandly competent as the great-great grandmother. Yet the deeper problem seems to lie with Ms. Tharp.

She has succeeded here where so many have failed, fashioning a ballet that mostly works as narrative, a children’s ballet tightly woven with movement motifs and layered with symbolic meanings that adults can appreciate. However, in simplifying and modernizing MacDonald’s story, she has oversimplified its characters and morals. Even as she venerates children, she underestimates them.

A choreographer’s task in this regard is much harder than a writer’s. But this is Twyla Tharp. I wish she had better heeded the example of MacDonald’s great-great grandmother figure, who is never afraid to tell Irene things she cannot yet understand but will someday.